


Unboxed

by Nevcolleil



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Bad Use of Schrodinger's Cat, How Season 3 Episode 1 Should have Ended Off-Screen, I Can't Seem to Write One Without the Other, M/M, Porn with Feelings, Sorry I'm Kind of Rusty :p
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 01:00:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17478284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: “Jack... you remember how much I admire Erwin Schrödinger, right? The Austrian physicist whose quantum theory-”“Yeah, the dead cat guy.” Jack interrupts, making one of his patented ‘Oh, boy.Science...’ expressions. This is the fond variation of the look, and Mac realizes that he’s missed even theleastpatient of those expressions so much that his chest aches seeing this one.





	Unboxed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [becauseimawinchester](https://archiveofourown.org/users/becauseimawinchester/gifts).



> I began writing this for Paige. She requested this steamy scene for her birthday. It took me way too long to write it :p and it took on a mind of its own at some point, but I hope it's enjoyable to all! Paige, I hope you had a fabulous birthday and that this fic lives up to at least some of your expectations :)

Mac has rarely felt this open to Jack, this exposed... and he’s not just thinking in the physical sense, his naked flesh covered only by Jack as they make love on top of the sheets in Jack’s bed, with Jack buried deep inside of Mac and pressing deeper still.

Maybe it’s the build up to this, the months Mac spent - once he’d snapped out of the fugue he’d spiralled into after finding his father - wondering if he’d lost this for himself forever, that makes every touch feel that much more intense. Every rumble of Jack’s sex-gruff voice in Mac’s ear travels right along his spine and to his cock, split-circuiting as it hits his chest to travel simultaneously to Mac’s heart.

“God, baby, you feel so good... so damned good, Angus,” Jack drawls against Mac’s skin and Mac’s breath hitches around a shattered moan.

“Yes, Jack...”

“This alright? You okay? Tell me-”

“B-better than alright... God, Jack, don’t stop,” Mac can only stutter when Jack’s hips slow, for what feels to Mac like the thousandth time, as Jack checks in with him again. 

He’s been doing it since the first kiss. Since they left the Phoenix in silence and climbed into Jack’s car without discussion. Since Jack quietly let Mac into his place and locked his door behind them, and they stared at one another for a moment, unspoken fears and terrified questions suddenly showing themselves on Jack’s face so plainly that Mac was able to let go of his own long enough to finally function.

Mac was already moving when Jack said, in this quiet, heart-rending voice - choked up and nervous, like Jack was sure he wouldn’t like the answer he was asking for but he had to ask for it anyway, “Can I kiss-”

Jack didn’t get another word in before Mac’s lips were on his, Mac’s fists were clenched in the front of Jack’s jacket, pulling Jack into him, and then the uncertain silence between them was well and truly broken. Jack groaned. It was a low, desperate sound Mac couldn’t make (he could barely _breathe_ around his relief - around this light-headed _gratitude_ ) but felt, all the way down to his bones.

Jack instantly began mapping the outlines of Mac’s body with his rough hands, sliding along the breadth of Mac’s shoulders, encircling his waist and rising across the planes of Mac’s back, like Jack was syncing his experience of the Mac presently in his arms with his memories of Mac before Mac ran away to Africa.

Ran away from everything... 

Including Jack.

Mac knows Jack’s going to need to get a _lot_ of words in before he can truly consider the two of them back together. Mac’s going to have to come through with some pretty heavy words himself, to balance out all of the things he _should_ have said over the months when he couldn’t risk talking to Jack at all. 

But even with that long conversation looming just beyond the edges of Jack’s bed, Mac is taken aback every time Jack hesitates in the middle of reaching for him - slows down just when Mac can feel how badly Jack wants to speed up, muscles quivering and breath shaky.

“Are you sure?” Jack asked, as soon as that first kiss ended. “Can I undress you?” Jack whispered shortly after that, into Mac’s parted lips, instead of just reaching for Mac’s belt like he normally would have. 

“This alright?” Jack asked for the first time tonight, brushing a fingertip across Mac’s entrance, as politely as if he were asking for a dance from a stranger.

Or an ex-lover... that he’s not entirely sure isn’t going to stand him up on the dancefloor.

“Don’t fucking stop...” Mac says again, half-angry (at himself - not at Jack.) Jack’s body is stretched out all the way on top of Mac’s - the front of Jack’s thighs to the back of Mac’s, their legs side by side, Jack’s feet hooked around Mac’s ankles.

The angle means Jack’s had to work his way inside slower, even after adequate prep. He doesn’t have a lot of leverage, chest pressed tightly to Mac’s back, breath at Mac’s ear. His arms are stretched alongside Mac’s, their fingers entwined just above Mac’s head on the mattress.

They’re not face to face, like they’ve been every other time they’ve done this. Mac can’t look Jack in the eyes, and Jack can’t see all of him.

But it’s still one of the most intimate lovemaking sessions Mac’s ever had. He’s never felt more connected to Jack. Less alone. Touching so completely... moving so slowly- 

Like Jack wasn’t just syncing up his memories of Mac with Mac in the flesh during foreplay, he was syncing up _them_. Mac could swear that they’re even breathing in tandem. So every time Jack needlessly asks his permission before going forward - presents Mac with an out in case, somehow, Mac’s lost his mind and decided he’d rather not do this after all...

It’s killing Mac to hear Jack question the need and the... the _oneness_ that Mac is feeling - the rightness of being back in Jack’s space, as close as they can physically be. Because Mac can feel in the way Jack holds him and hear in Jack’s voice that Jack feels it too - Jack’s hiding nothing from him. If anything, he seems to be _screaming_ how much he still wants Mac, with every move he makes. And Jack is only questioning whether Mac is right there with him because of what Mac did.

“ _Please_ ,” Mac says, unevenly, a lot quieter and a lot less forcefully than he intended. More like the word actually implies - like Mac is pleading seriously, not just for effect, the way he usually does when he tosses out the word during sex, having known even that first time that they slept together that he’s never really had to ask Jack for anything. “Please. Jack, please...”

Thankfully, it doesn’t seem as though much has changed in that way, at least. Mac _barely_ has to begin pleading before Jack gives him exactly what he wants.

“I got you,” Jack tells him, hips abruptly stuttering back to life. “It’s alright. It’s alright, Mac. I won’t stop. I’ll never stop...”

And there’s a thickness in his voice that says he’s no more talking about fucking than Mac is.

But Jack does - fuck Mac, that is. _Finally_. With an enthusiasm as sharp as the longing, and hunger, and despair - and _joy_ \- that Mac himself has felt over the last twenty-four hours.

Jack squeezes Max’s left hand with his own. With his right, he lets Mac go to instead tangle his fingers in Mac’s sex-tossed hair. 

Then he thrusts sharply - penetrating Mac fully at last. Before Mac’s even finished crying out in response, Jack pulls back and thrusts forward again, setting a pace _worthy_ of begging - not that Mac has the breath anymore for speech that organized.

Instead, Mac pants a series of half-sensible praises and curses, and multiple iterations of his lover’s name, rising in volume as Jack curls the fingers in Mac’s hair and twists - tilting Mac’s head sideways and pressing his lips to the spot where Mac’s rabbiting pulse thrums under the flushed skin of Mac’s throat.

Maybe they make love this way for an hour. Maybe it’s only minutes. It’s simultaneously too much and not enough. 

The important thing, to Mac, is that by the time he’s falling apart beneath Jack, Jack has moved his arms to snake them around Mac’s body and is holding him close.

And there were no questions, no hesitation, beforehand. Just Jack whispering, “Yeah... yeah, there you go, baby. Oh god-”

And then Jack’s taking what he needs from Mac just as freely. Burying his face in Mac’s shoulder and himself in the heat of Mac’s body with abandon, finishing with a litany of “Angus... oh, Angus...” in a voice so soft and so shattered that he might as well be praying the name as moaning it in pleasure.

Afterwards, neither of them moves for long moments.

A part of Mac wishes that they never had to move at all. That he could just remain like this, so incredibly close to Jack, and yet ultimately less exposed than he felt as they made love - his face mostly hidden beneath the sprawl of his and Jack’s bodies on top of Jack’s sex-mussed bedsheets.

That’s exactly why he forces himself to roll over, Jack rolling with him until the two of them are lying on their sides and facing one another. 

Mac’s taken enough shortcuts recently, around facing his feelings and allowing others to face them as well. His “shortcut” led him all the way to Nigeria, and to a place where he wasn’t sure he even _had_ Jack to face feelings with once he’d found his way home.

“I didn’t mean to leave _you_ , Jack...,” Mac says. “I _never_ meant for that to happen.”

‘I just didn’t know how to stay,’ is on the tip of Mac’s tongue.

“I know that, Mac,” Jack tells him, freezing the words before they pass Mac’s lips.

Because Jack is smiling as he talks, reaching over and brushing Mac’s hair off of his face with the hand not tangled up between his and Mac’s bodies. If his touch while they made love was gentle, Jack touches Mac’s face now with something like reverence. He looks at Mac like Mac, sweaty from sex and less than fresh off of a day of stress and struggle and international travel, is the most beautiful thing Jack’s ever seen, but the smile he’s smiling is not his happy one.

It’s the sort of smile Mac has feared seeing on Jack’s face since pulling Jack out of that jeep. 

In that moment, Jack pulled Mac to him and wrapped him in that enveloping hug that Mac has missed so much, with a grin Jack himself would probably call “as wide as Texas”, laughing just the same as Jack always laughs when they both pull through at the last second of being too close to not.

Then Jack took a step back. Instead of laying into him like Mac had expected, telling Mac that he’d been stupid to just disappear like he had; telling him that he’d been a terrible partner - in both senses of the word - and a worse friend... Instead of reminding Mac, like he’s done dozen of times, that “we’re in this together, hoss...” Jack just-

He took a step back. His eyes didn’t quite meet Mac’s and his grin didn’t _quite_ fall, but it didn’t stay the same either as he talked about the team being back together. 

Mac’s heart jumped into his throat for the second time in less than ten minutes. He’d thought it would rip it’s way out of his body through his mouth when that jeep looked like it was going to go over the cliff with Jack still inside of it.

Mac felt the same way wondering if being back on Jack’s team was the only kind of ‘together’ left on the table for them.

Mac spent every moment between then and stepping through Jack’s apartment door managing his calm. Telling himself that it would serve him right if Jack didn’t want anything more than to work with him after Mac took off the way he did without a word. That of course they’d have to talk everything out - like Mac should have talked to Jack before he left - before Jack would even be sure of what he wants. 

Jack’s still holding Mac close. He’s made it more than clear that he does still want Mac.

But that sad smile suggests that that’s the only thing Jack is sure of in the absence of the talk they have coming. If anything, Mac realizes, falling into bed with Jack before having it may have made Jack even _less_ sure about Mac’s side of things.

“Finding your dad like that and finding out that the dude is _Oversight_... That was a _lot_ ,” Jack is saying, like he’s said the same thing to himself many times more than once. “That would mess up anybody, man. I get it. You needed your space, just to wrap that genius head around all of it. Nobody blames you for that, Mac.”

Mac would shake his head, but he doesn’t want to dislodge Jack’s hand, where it rests now, light and warm against Mac’s face.

Jack’s eyes are dark, and gorgeous, and wet in the moonlight filtering in between the blinds covering Jack’s bedroom windows.

“Jack-”

“I’m just saying,” Jack continues, like he’s trying to get the words out before they fail him. His touch feels less light now, his fingers curling around the curve of Mac’s jaw.

“And. And if you still need that,” Jack says stiltedly. His voice stretches paper thin on every other word, but he says it. “More space. More time to yourself... I promise you, Mac. I can get behind that too. Whatever you need. I'll wait as long as you-”

That, as it turns out, is a thing that Mac needs Jack to stop saying.

He ducks away from Jack’s hand, and before the hurt that sparks in Jack’s eyes at the move can catch fire, Mac rises until he can straddle Jack’s thighs.

Sitting on top of Jack, Mac swoops down to litter kisses along Jack’s neck and across his chest. They’re both really sticky and gross now - and Jack cringes as much as he laughs, startled and ticklish - but Jack’s grip on Mac’s hips is easy when his hands fall there, and when Mac looks Jack in the eyes again, that smile of Jack’s seems a little less sad. Jack’s gaze seems a little more open and less resigned.

Mac’s known that they’d need to talk, all this time, but Mac _still_ isn’t quite sure how to say what he needs to say.

So he just does what he always does... 

He improvises and hopes for the best.

“Jack... you remember how much I admire Erwin Schrödinger, right? The Austrian physicist whose quantum theory-”

“Yeah, the dead cat guy.” Jack interrupts, making one of his patented ‘Oh, boy. _Science_...’ expressions. This is the fond variation of the look, and Mac realizes that he’s missed even the _least_ patient of those expressions so much that his chest aches seeing this one. 

“Really, Mac? You wanna talk about quantum theory _now_?” Jack rolls his hips beneath Mac - not as if to start something, but just because, causing a pleasant friction despite the stickiness. “What am I saying? Of course you do,” Jack says with the softest of laughs and an affectionate eye roll.

Mac can _feel_ his own voice waver, along with his lip, but _God_. He’d run from _this_?

Mac had been even more messed up than he’d realized.

“The point of his thought experiment,” spills out of Mac, “is that the cat _wasn’t_ dead. Not until Schrödinger could open up the box and prove it. Until then, he could theorize that the cat had probably suffocated... He could cite everything he knew about oxygen decay and feline lung capacity - he could do all the math with the cat’s weight and age, the dimensions of the box itself, the time it takes for the average mammal to fall into an oxygen-deprived deep sleep-”

“Mac?” Jack asks, brows furrowing, confused by Mac’s tone and the speed of his speech.

Yes, and probably what ‘feline lung capacity’ has to do with anything.

“But he couldn’t definitively say that the cat was dead unless he opened up the box,” Mac keeps going, trying to get all of his thoughts out before they can retreat again, into that place where he’d kept all of his thoughts and feelings concerning his father until he’d met Oversight, face to face. “No one had ever tested how long a cat can live inside of a tightly sealed space before, much less in a clinical setting, so Schrödinger couldn’t 'know’, for _sure_ , that it was dead...

“Just like I couldn’t know for sure why my father left,” Mac gets to the point, feeling that waver enter his voice again and battling it back. 

“Oh, Mac...,” Jack says, going still beneath him, face changing.

But Mac’s not finished. “I mean, I’d guessed,” he says. “Looking back, Dad was never... He didn’t handle emotion well. I guess neither of us do.” It had taken Mac a while to tell Jack that he loves him, in even a platonic way, even though Jack’s been saying it to him for years. Even though Mac’s _felt_ it for years, as well. Once they’d finally started dating, Jack had clarified that the way he loves Mac has grown, almost immediately. Jack had insisted that they didn’t need to make a big deal out of the fact, and Mad had told him how much he appreciated that, but he hadn’t offered Jack the same clarification.

Mac hadn’t really let himself examine why until he’d been in Africa, examining everything from afar. He’d thought he was just being cautious before. He’s never been in a relationship with a man besides Jack, and Jack had told him that he’s never had a _real_ relationship with another man - one that carried over outside of the bedsheets.

But in Nigeria, as Mac pondered the casual way his father had upended everything Mac had thought he’d understood about his life... Mac realized that he’d never heard his father tell Mac’s mother that he loved her before she got sick. She would say 'I love you’ to James, and James would smile at her softly and say, 'Thank you.’

Maybe that was enough - a joke or a codeword between the two of them that worked just as well. Maybe any ‘I love you’s, Mac’s dad told Mom were said when Mac wasn’t right there listening, but that memory was enough to make Mac wonder if perhaps caution had had nothing to do with any of it.

“Mac, all due respect to your father and all,” Jack says firmly, breaking Mac out of his thoughts. “But you are _nothing_ like that man. Not in the ways that count, alright?”

“Are you sure about that?” Mac asks. And he doesn’t notice Jack opening his mouth to say more when he says, “Jack... I love you. In every _possible_ way. I’ve been _in_ love with you, probably since Afghanistan. And I never said that to you the way I should have. Then my Dad was back, and he was our _boss_ , and the box I’d always kind of kept his leaving in in my head, I guess, had blown wide open...”

Mac continues to speak quickly, hoping that the sudden slackness around Jack’s mouth - he looks like his jaw has _literally_ dropped - is from speechlessness and shock, not horror at what Mac is saying to him. 

“So I ran,” Mac admits. “I ran away from him... And I didn’t mean to, but I think I was running away from you too. Because I knew _you_ loved me, Jack. I knew that. And I ‘knew’ you weren’t going to just take off one day and never come back, but I also knew that if you did, that would probably kill me. I’m not even exaggerating. I didn’t want _space_ , Jack... Not from you. I just didn’t know what I’d do if _our_ box got opened too and-”

Jack sits up abruptly, nearly toppling Mac out of his lap - not that it matters.

Because simultaneously, Jack wraps Mac up in his arms. He takes Mac’s head in both his hands, Mac’s hair sliding through his fingers, and kisses Mac even more passionately than he had as they stood just inside Jack’s door.

Jack pulls his mouth back, after kissing Mac long enough that Mac’s dizzy from it, but not his face - his forehead remains pressed to Mac’s, his hands have slid to frame Mac’s face tightly, and they’re still breathing the same warm breath when Jack says, “I love you so much, Angus.”

His hands are shaking where they touch Mac, and Mac shakes with them, like he’s been out of place for so long that he’s become misshapen, but now that he’s heard those words from Jack again he’s been refitted.

“And I swear - I _swear_ to you, man,” Jack is saying between light kisses, “We are a strictly outside-the-box operation, understand?”

Mac nods. He breathes. 

“Unless that’s a bad thing...” Jack adds. “I’m not sure I followed that metaphor all the way through.”

Mac laughs.

He waits until they’ve just about settled in to sleep, much later - one long talk and a long shower in the meantime - to tell Jack that it was really more of an analogy.

Jack hits him with a pillow.


End file.
